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IK Version 3 is Official Live!

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Intuitive Keys Legacy is designed to provide the absolute best-sounding, most comprehensive library of sounds from stock MainStage.

Expanded

IK is now drastically expanded over the first version released in 2017. Today, IK is built on 80 instrument instances, which significantly expands its sonic palette. IK is efficiently built around layers and aliases. Included preconfigured are:

  • 60 pads  (warm, bright, chaotic)
  • 20 synths (14 polys / 6 monos)
  • 20 keyboards (Rhodes, EPs, Organs)
  • 15 Orchestral (plucks, strings)
  • 40 Movement (arps, pulses, animations)

Stock Pianos + Audio In

Intuitive Keys supports two stock pianos at the concert level (always available at the touch of a button), and also supports hardware input! So if your hardware keyboard isn’t getting much love these days, try running it through our piano engine, and breathe new life into even older machines. If you’re running a Nord as a controller, here’s your chance to put that machine to some good use!

The brightness/darkness of the stock Yamaha and Steinway pianos is tuned with the mod wheel. In the default mod wheel position, the pianos are tuned to be warm and sit under the vocals. Three compression settings are available on the pianos: Soft (default), Lush, and Hard, and two reverbs are available, Spacious and Dense, plus a spectacular Shimmer effect. An Add 8va button is available which puts an octave on top of the note you’re playing. This is extremely useful for featuring thematic elements on breaks between song sections. Taken together, the piano engine has a powerful emotional range that allows you to tell the story of the song in a compelling way!

Intuitive Keys optionally supports Piano 162, Grand Rhapsody, Alecia’s Keys, The Giant, with piano instrument channels, all of which can be configured through the piano engine. In this way, IK maintains the efficiency of using just one instance of a piano sound, with the full flexibility of configuring it as needed.

Intuitive Keys Ver 2 Release!

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Intuitive Keys MainStage template Version 2 has just been released as a free upgrade for owners of Intuitive Keys Light and Intuitive Keys Legacy!

The updates for the Intuitive Keys Light version are cosmetic, but the sheen of old school purple is sure to make this version stand out on its own.

The Intuitive Keys Legacy version gains a classic blue color, and now includes several features released first on the Light version – specifically the +8va and Shimmer. These were implemented slightly differently for the Legacy version via dual-use buttons, but we’re sure users of that version will be able to use them even more effectively while playing live.

The Intuitive Keys Legacy Series 0 gains an audio-through functionality, which allows a user to insert audio (such as your own hardware piano) into the signal path of the stock MainStage pianos!

Series 1 continues support for Ivy Audio’s Piano 162 (with those notes in the upper velocity range nicely tamed).

Series 2 continues support for Waves Grand Rhapsody. This piano sounds so good – you’ll want to pick it up as soon as you possibly can.

Series 3 supports NI The Giant for the first time, largely considered to be a gold standard for 3rd party pianos. We’re extremely proud to be bringing our particular implementation of this piano, with the mod wheel carefully mapped to the brightness function. This piano begins with a moody darkness and grows brighter to work with the dynamics and flow of the song, without having to implement multiple instances of the piano into separate patches.

The synth engine remains unchanged for now, and we remain committed to bringing you the best stock MainStage can deliver with the Intuitive Keys Legacy version. For an updated list of all Intuitive Keys versions, please visit /versions.

Intuitive Keys MainStage Template

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I’m so excited to be releasing my own MainStage Template that I call “Intuitive Keys“.

This template is a product of this Building Your Band blog and podcast after spending an inordinate amount of time considering how much the architecture of a template informs the way sounds are created, and wondering exactly how I would want to inform that process.

First, it’s branded as Intuitive Keys precisely because the beauty of making music is that there is no logic that informs a right or wrong answer. Decisions in music are completely intuitive. So I don’t want the process of playing to be cerebral either. Now I love being cerebral, I’m a spreadsheet guy (shout out to auto filter and pivot tables!) and I love doing my pre-production sound design before I play. But when it comes time to make music, I want to be able to be in the moment. Consequently, I’ve made a lot of decisions ahead of time in this template.

In fact, this template works by making decisions ahead of time. This means it’s not as configurable in real time as templates with multiple faders, but I would argue it’s more playable because every sound is carefully mapped to the mod wheel and aftertouch and it’s ultimately capable of achieving similar (or better) results by moving between different combinations of sounds.

The impetus behind using the mod wheel and after-touch to modulate the sound in real time comes from the firm conviction that only half of the job of playing keyboards is playing notes. The other half is playing your sound, and to that end, the large X-Y pad in the middle of the screen informs you of the range of MIDI value (0-127) that your hardware is transmitting for your mod-wheel in the horizontal (X) direction, and aftertouch in the vertical (Y) direction. Changing these two parameters is how you “play your sound”, and this design actually helps teach synthesis to aspiring modern keyboardists.

Anyone who has been around me knows that arranging is key to how I think about music. So being able to move in and out of the pianos is a critical component of that. The way Intuitive Keys is configured, there is the synthesis engine on top (featuring the large X-Y pad), but then a piano engine on the bottom row that is always available and can layer any of the sounds in the synthesis engine as shown in the menu.

Finally, I’m going to admit that not only do I have no interest in recreating the album, I think it’s counterproductive to what you should be doing in your community. In any community, out of country or local, our job is to contextualize the message. You may think you don’t do that, but I assure you that the way your church worships would be inconceivably shocking to Jesus’ disciples. We all do that. So to do that at the micro-level helps validate that message all the more. Getting off my theological soapbox and returning to music, the current trend is for albums to use many tracks and use bright sounds. An excellent engineer can craft out space for the vocals to fit with bright sounds, but this puts an extraordinary and I would argue, unnecessary, burden on a live sound engineer, regardless of their level. Consequently, I have created very warm sounds largely inspired by analog synthesis. This isn’t to say that there are no high-frequency components, but where there are (particularly in the digital and some of the analog sounds with the mod-wheel cranked) those high frequencies are tempered to facilitate vocals riding on top. This should make mixing your keyboard parts in easier, and may even get you turned up in the mix, whereas a brighter sound reminiscent of the album’s sounds, may get you quickly turned down.

Using this template (with 50 patches and 50 combinations), encourages you to:

  1. Use a different patch/combination for every song, maybe more than one!
  2. Modulate that patch/combination with the mod wheel and aftertouch in real time to help tell the story of the song.
  3. Move in and out of using the acoustic piano to change up the tonality of the keyboards and keep the piano sounding fresh.
  4. Use warm sounds in order to facilitate a great mix suitable for vocals to sit on top.

I really hope you get a chance to check it out and use it. To find out more visit intuitivekeys.com and join the Intuitive Keys Facebook group.

Wake Up (feat. Amanda Joy Hu) [Underwater Mix]

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underwaterMy friend Amanda Joy Hu asked if we could record a simple piano version of “All Sons & Daughters” song “Wake Up” for some missionary friends of hers going through a rough time. How could I say no? Plus it was a chance to record with Amanda – who is extremely talented and has just a gorgeous voice. So we got together on Saturday morning along with bassist and habitual partner in crime Teo, and spend a couple hours improvising in headphones together, to a click. My secret suspicion was we would have something special here, so I wanted to be sure we were playing to a click so I could have a little fun with it after everyone left.

So sure enough, I really loved the vocal (which Amanda helped edit over email if you can believe it!). Although I wasn’t really familiar with the song before we tracked it, it really seemed to me like there was a drowning component to the song, one of suffocation under the weight of circumstances, so I used that as the seed of inspiration for my keyboard programming and just kept “underwater mix” in my mind throughout.

Here it is on soundcloud – but please add it to your favorite music platform as well – and let me know what you think!!

@ iTunes | Music | Spotify | Amazon | Google Play

 

Vocal by Amanda Joy Hu
Bass by Aron Teo Lee
Programming by Peter Bulanow

Recorded, Mixed and Mastered at the Matrix, Herndon VA
Produced by Peter Bulanow for meltingearth.com

Written by David Leonard, Don Chaffer, Leslie Jordan
(All Sons & Daughters, Season One)

The Revised Common Lectionary

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Cx_SeventhSundayofEasterThe lectionary reading for May 8th 2016 is a very meltingearth kind of scripture.

This wasn’t the Psalm that originally inspired the name, so I’m starting to realize David explored these ideas on more than on occasion.

Psalm 97
The LORD is king! Let the earth rejoice; let the many coastlands be glad!
Clouds and thick darkness are all around him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.
Fire goes before him, and consumes his adversaries on every side.
His lightnings light up the world; the earth sees and trembles.
The mountains melt like wax before the LORD, before the Lord of all the earth.
The heavens proclaim his righteousness; and all the peoples behold his glory.
All worshipers of images are put to shame, those who make their boast in worthless idols; all gods bow down before him.
Zion hears and is glad, and the towns of Judah rejoice, because of your judgments, O God.
For you, O LORD, are most high over all the earth; you are exalted far above all gods.
The LORD loves those who hate evil; he guards the lives of his faithful; he rescues them from the hand of the wicked.
Light dawns for the righteous, and joy for the upright in heart.
Rejoice in the LORD, O you righteous, and give thanks to his holy name!

The MeltingEarth Band

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Building Your Band SQBuilding Your Band is one of the really practical applications of meltingearth. It’s a concerted effort to pass on to the next generation of musicians the wisdom and experience of an established musician.

Building Your Band is also a response to a general observation – that more often than not when I hear music that isn’t working, the solution is not necessarily that the musicians individually need to become more proficient. Rather, the solution is often that a producer needs to get everyone and the band working together better in order to better serve the song.

Building Your Band is a blog where I write about these issues, but it’s also a podcast where I have unscripted / uncoached interviews with folks around the US and the world talking about these very issues.

Eileen, Dan, Teo, Brew, Roxy, Pete (at DCA)

L->R: Eileen, Dan, Teo, Brew, Roxy, Pete (at DCA)

Recently I had an opportunity to take a team to Jamaica to lead worship for Willow Creek’s Global Leadership Summit, as well as to host some workshops with some area churches. I took a team of veteran musicians from the DC area, most of which were podcast alumni (and the rest soon will be). It was a fantastic time of creating music with a group of music producers and worship leaders, and my favorite part of the workshops we held, is they were untouched (just like my podcast). Yet there is an incredible harmony from the perspective of each member of the team.

L->R: Brew, Dan, Roxy, Dave, Eileen, Teo, Pete: in Jamaica

L->R: Brew, Dan, Roxy, Dave, Eileen, Teo, Pete: in Jamaica

Since we can’t call ourselves “The Building Your Band Band,” we’re “meltingearth.”

 

Almighty

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@ iTunes | Stitcher | Amazon | Google Play

“Almighty“- Produced, Mixed & Mastered by Peter Bulanow

Here is some backstory.

Featuring: Taylor Carson | http://taylorcarson.com
Additional Vocals:  Eileen Graham | http://eileengrahammusic.com
Cello: Michael Thomas | facebook.com/CelloMT
Bass: Aron “Teo” Lee | facebook.com/teo.lee
Keyboards & Programming: Peter Bulanow

“Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” is a hymn based on Joachim Neander‍‍’‍s German chorale Lobe den Herren, den mächtigen König der Ehren, published in 1680. John Julian in his A Dictionary of Hymnology calls the German original “a magnificent hymn of praise to God, perhaps the finest creation of its author, and of the first rank in its class.” The melody used by Neander, first published in 1665, exists in many versions and is probably based on a folk tune. The text paraphrases Psalm 103 and Psalm 150. Catherine Winkworth published her English translation of Neander’s hymn in 1863. (wikipedia)

Indescribable

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A concept video set to Chris Tomlin’s song.

I love reading theoretical physics, particularly by non-theists, as their viewpoint would be without a theistic agenda (i.e. not propaganda). One of the most worshipful titles for a book that I could imagine would be “The Elegant Universe,” which is a book that the non-theist Brian Green wrote. Brian is kind of a “rock star” of modern physics, perhaps the heir apparent to Einstein and then Hawkins. This book spawned a NOVA special that walks you through the ideas of the book, and which served as much of the source material for this edit.

This product was originally created as a “click track video”, with some of the sound effects on the right channel to be sent to the house, and a click so that a live band could play in time to this song on the left channel, to be sent to the drummer’s in-ear monitors.

One of the real highlights for me was invoking the differential equations of the four electro-magnetic forces commonly known as Maxwell’s equations (1:38) to illuminate what God most certainly declared when he created light. As an engineer who studied those four equations for two semesters, having those beautiful statements presented in a sanctuary serve to unite God in his creation in a significant way.

I loved the opportunity to use the actual Apollo 8 Genesis reading during the bridge (2:25).

Calabi-YauAnother notable feature (3:12) is the rendering of the 6-dimensional Calabi Yau shape necessary for the math in String Theory, which I used to illustrate the idea of “Indescribable’. Since we live in three dimensions of space, a six dimensional object would certainly seem incomprehensible to us.

Our God, creator of our reality, with so many more dimensions than six, would be so much more so indescribable.

origins

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meltingearthlogothe name meltingearth is inspired by this passage –

at the voice of God the earth itself melts.  [Psalm 46:6 CEV]

Sacred Texts . com has this to say about the passage:

He uttered his voice – God spoke; he gave command; he expressed his will.

The earth melted – The very earth seemed to melt or dissolve before him. Everything became still. The danger passed away at his command, and the raging world became calm.

The goal of meltingearth is to facilitate this impact, this effect, through better art.